Practically all of the articles appear to be messed up with code, where you are supposed to see images instead. Keep in mind, I inspected the forum before registering, so I saw the site the way an unregistered visitor sees it:

For some reason the images do appear properly when you're logged in as a member. But you can probably imagine how this can put visitors off.

In case you are wondering why the screenshot is all gray while it's supposed to be black, I overrided the color scheme of SD with my own. You know why? The current theme has a rather extreme contrast, and this is not the best choice for a forum, blog, or any other kind of site where you'll be frequently reading text on the screen. If you look at SD's pages a little too long you start to see an afterimage effect. My recommendation would be to choose a theme with black text on a mild background color. Most websites either have black text on a white background, and quite a few others go for the opposite extreme, yet neither are good choices in the end due to ergonomic reasons. This has nothing to do with any preference for style or colors, though.

When logged in, the forum's width can do strange things. Sometimes the forum automatically adjusts to the browser's width, which is the best solution. Strangely, other times it keeps the yellow links on the left side of the page as if you're still looking at the home page. And yet other times the forum stretches beyond the browser's width.

When you're not logged in, you always get scenario number two.
In other words, there appear to be some technical issues with the forum software.

The way the forum has been indexed is a joke, with only one board for discussions, and one for larger articles. Most internet forums have a least a few boards for different topics, and the bigger websites also have different categories. But yeah, there is no reason to change any of it when a forum is almost dead. If social deviancy does gain traffic it would be best to extend and improve the forum index.

As I said in another thread, the regulations are kind of vague. While I've never encountered a website that didn't have a super-vague policy, making a clear set of rules is perfectly doable. In my opinion, there is something wrong when two entire pages have been devoted to the regulations, yet it still isn't clear what the members mustn't do.

Finally, and this is by far the single biggest issue, the forum is infested with turds. And turds attract turds, ultimately leading to the total turdification of social deviancy. By turds I mean shitty members of course. It's a virtuous circle. If no one ever does something different, something better than what an average turd would do, nothing's going to change. If someone who would be a huge gain to this forum spots social deviancy in its current state, he or she wouldn't bother to register. Why would anyone join a dying forum, that's falling apart from misery and spam?

Yes, I did join this forum against all odds. I would be lying if I said that I'm not skeptical at this point. But I don't have a whole lot of options either.

One more thing: I think that every good site needs to have a few quirks, just a couple of things you don't see on others sites to give it some character...

Each of these individual points of critique may seem insignificant, but all of them combined can make a serious difference.

Jackie wrote:Well, that's how it is supposed to look, so you may have a strange problem with your PC. Are you using an old internet browser?

Chris, don't soil yourself. That's NOT how it's supposed to look. Jackie's got browser overrides set to change the font colors and sizes, background colors, and pretty much everything else. I've never seen it look like that either, and hopefully I never will because it means something's gone ass up with my site.

Jackie, I'll have my coder look into these issues and see if we can't tidy up some of those formatting problems, especially the one about HTML image codes not parsing properly when a user isn't logged in. You're right, it's not helpful if new users come to the site and see a bunch of glitches. Consider it looked into, and thanks for making the effort to write this post and bring all this shit to my attention.